JEWISH INFLUENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE
"If
anything distinguishes American
Jews today within the context of American
society
it is the special deference
that society accords
them."
-- Charles Liebman/Stephen Cohen, p. 7
"I
have found that being Catholic
means having less status than
being Jewish. I see it
in the media, in the newspapers,
in the
intonations; I do not
see how one can avoid that feeling
or
sensibility."
--
Michael Novak, [in Stallsworth, p.
71]
"I'm
half Jewish and half nothing."
(four-year-old
boy in an elevator, to his friend),
[COWAN, P., 1987, p. 245]
"Too many Jews have turned
away from the modern project,
from
the Enlightenment and
the idea of progress, to barricade
themselves in an angry
tribalism." -- Norman Birnbaum, Tikkun,
p.
111
"The Jews in America
... have become very powerful
as a lobby and
can afford the luxury
of being hypersensitive. Any
little thing that
you say in criticism
is seen as a criticism against
the people. They
seem to want to be seen
as infallible."
-- South African Bishop
Desmond
Tutu,
Nobel Peace Prize Winner
"When Jews see themselves
as superior to all other human
beings
... they are claiming
license to do what is forbidden
to others."
-- Yehoshafat
Harkabi, former chief of
Israeli military intelligence, p.
180
"I didn't hear that polio
was cured today. I heard that
a Jewish
doctor cured polio today." -- Godfrey Cambridge, Black comedian,
SIMONS,
p. 135-136
"[Black Americans have]
an envy of the Jewish position
and an
exaggerated notion of
their power, which is standard
in the
anti-Semitic imagination."
-- Henry Feingold, Jewish scholar, p.
77
"American Jews have exerted
an extraordinary impact upon
the
character of the United
States."
--
Stephen
Whitfield, Jewish scholar,
[AMERICAN
SPACE,
p.20]
"It is all very puzzling.
Who are these people, Christians
wonder,
who have moved so rapidly
from obscurity to positions
of
prominence, even influence,
in American society ... [and]
why
do Jews seek to stick
together so much?"
-- Charles
Silberman, Jewish scholar,
p. 26
"The
period after World War II, especially,
was a time of advance.
Before
then Jews had moved into the
entertainment field, dominating
Hollywood,
and had begun to move into medicine,
the sciences,
academia,
journalism, and cultural life
in general. By the 1960s,
they
were disproportionately represented
in most professions having to
do
with
the creation or dissemination
of culture."
--
Stanley Rothman and S.
Robert Lichter, Jewish authors,
1982, p. 96
"Jews in America are
a power group; is it unreasonable
for some
people to ask whether
Jews have too much power?"
-- Jerome
Chanes, Jewish scholar,
[in Weiss, p. 32]
"We Jews still
prepare ourselves to fight the
things the world
plans on doing to us.
It ain't true ... Jews are not
victims. We are
the players." -- J. J. Goldberg
[in Silverstein, B., p. 5]
Transcending religion,
race, or any other traditional
Judaic reference, modern American
Jewry is often described these
days as a voluntary (from the
perspective of the individual,
not the community, which claims
Jews by birth to the "community
of fate") polity,
a secular organizational network
with emphasis upon social, educational,
economic and political activism.
It is an organization
that unifies atheists and the
religious, rich and the less
affluent, Sephardim, Ashkenazi,
and any other self-defined "Jew"
within a communal solidarity
to Jewish "peoplehood" and its
four unifying pillars of Jewish
identity: 1) belief in a communal
identity of historic persecution
and victimhood and the uniqueness
of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust,
2) belief in the omnipresent
threat of an irrational anti-Semitism,
3) allegiance to the modern
state of Israel, and 4) a dedication
to helping others Jews.
The secular Jewish
polity is a very adjusted model
of the old obsolete "kehillah"
self-governing organization
that the Jewish community in
Europe used to mediate with
-- and distance itself from
-- the surrounding non-Jewish
people and cultures. While today's
Jewish polity is world's apart
in method and structure from
the old institution, its purpose
for existence today has moved
towards what is was in ancient
times: Jewish people distinct
from, and often at the expense
of, others. (Since the late
1960s, there has been a major
shift in fundamental American
Jewish attitudes: from helping
fellow Jews assimilate fully
into American mainstream society,
to its polar opposite: massive
amounts of money raised to support
all aspects of
"being Jewish.”) [SINGER,
p. 220] The largest and best
known expression of this polity
is the United Jewish Appeal,
an entity that has some 225
"federation'" sub-branches throughout
the country. (In 1999, the UJA
merged with other groups to
form the "United Jewish Communities.")
Such organizations claim a supportive
base of 95% of all Jews in America.
[WOOCHER] (One UJA fundraising
brochure summed up its sense
of itself by stating that "the
programs of [our] agencies ...
are not merely organizational
endeavors, even 'good works'
... they are expressions of
the essential meaning of Jewishness."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 19]) By 1980,
4,600 "key leaders" traveled
to Israel that year alone on
UJA "missions." [SILBERMAN,
p. 198]]
Still other Jewish
polity expressions (what Daniel
Elazar describes as "government-like
institutions" [ELAZAR, p. 217]
include B'nai Brith (and its
Anti-Defamation League), Haddassah,
the American Jewish Committee,
the American Jewish Congress,
the National Council for Jewish
Women, and a variety of overtly
Zionist organizations, most
linked to the American Zion
Federation. The central Jewish
lobbying organ for Israel is
the American Israel Political
Action Committee -- AIPAC. By
1982 Jewish Americans had "no
less than 340 national organizations."
[KREFETZ, p. 71] More than eighty
were expressly Zionist or other
pro-Israeli groups. [WAXMAN,
p. 134]
This modern American
Jewish polity is often noted
as a quintessential "civil religion,"
a secular belief system that
elicits deeply-felt allegiance
of religious depth and proportion.
"It has become a commonplace
in recent years," notes Peter
Novick, "that Israel and the
Holocaust are the twin pillars
of American Jewish 'civil religion'
-- the symbols that bind together
Jews in the United States whether
they are believers or nonbelievers,
on the political right, left,
or center." [NOVICK, P., 1999,
p. 147] (The modern Jewish attachment
to Judaism as a formal religion
in most of the twentieth century
has been weak. A 1971 study
revealed that only 17% of American
Jews attended religious services
more than once a month; this
was in comparison to 65% of
non-Jews who did so). [FORSTER,
p. 128] As in any religion,
the secular Jewish polity beliefs
are articles of faith. They
need not make logical sense
to an outside observer; even
some of its adherents may recognize
-- and struggle to resolve --
various incongruencies, paradoxes,
and hypocrisies in its central
tenets. As the Random House
dust jacket blurb noted for
James Yaffe's 1968 volume The
American Jews: Portrait of a
Split Personality, "no people
on earth are more riddled by
contradictions than the American
Jews." [YAFFE, 1968]
These inconsistencies
largely stem from Jewish attempts
to rationalize their traditional
(and current) notions of their
exalted selves as the Chosen
People in the context of a modern
western society that socializes
against such chauvinism, a pan-human
perspective that most Jews themselves
give public lip service. Jewish
reluctance to surrender, however,
(whatever form of) their self-perceived
hereditary specialness as central
to Jewish identity has created
for some a lingering moral and
psychological dilemma, one that
the Jewish polity resolves by
dissimulation and/or equivocation,
by enforcing the preposterous
and paradoxical Jewish myth
that it is Jewish chauvinistic
exceptionality itself that created
the notion of pan-human universality.
"[The Jewish polity believes
that] America is, after all,
created in their [Jewish] image,"
says Jonathan Woocher, "and
in pursuing the civil Jewish
version of Jewish destiny, they
are merely reinforcing the terms
of America's own understanding."
[WOOCHER, p. 102]
"Whether Jews
define themselves as 'just Jewish,'
'ethnic Jews,' 'nonreligious
Jews,' or some other phrase
that classified them as more
assimilated," noted Gary Tobin
in 1988, "most know that they
are different from other Americans....
[TOBIN, p. 70] ... For most
Jews, there continues to be
a 'them' and an 'us,' even though
the 'us' is in some ways part
of the 'them' ... [TOBIN, p.
73] ... The majority of American
Jews continue to struggle to
maintain their separate identity."
[TOBIN, p. 74] "Despite their
strong desire for integration
into American society," wrote
Nathan Glazer in 1972, "Jews
do not, on the whole intermarry
and do maintain themselves apart.
How to resolve this contradiction
is one of the major dilemmas
of Judaism in America." [GLAZER,
p. 10]
This "contradiction"
is clearly manifest in the very
principles of Jewish identity
that are diametrically opposed
to the founding principles of
Americanism. As Adam Garfinkle
observes:
"The principle of individualist
equality that flows from American
sacred texts and the
American experience cannot be
reconciled with
the hierarchical, communal
principle that flows from halakhah,
Jewish religious law.
Many try and some claim success,
but
'success' is mere illusion.
Most American Jews have two
religions
the way some men have
one wife and one mistress, or
some women
one husband and one lover.
It is a condition that can be
managed,
learned from, even enjoyed,
some times for long periods.
But it can
never be brought to true
reconciliation." [GARFINKLE,
p. 4]
After
a 1950s survey of American
Jews, researcher Joseph Adelson
noted the "confusion" some
Jews had in grappling with
stereotypes about Jews that
seemed to them to be true,
all centering on the contradictions
of Jewish identity and "self-hatred"
(i.e., self-criticism):
"It should be emphasized
that the nonauthoritarian
[a 1950s-era term for the
non-prejudiced] are not free
from conflicts and confusions
about being Jewish;
indeed, they frequently seem
more disturbed than do the
authoritarian [i.e.,
"prejudiced" Jews who put
stock in some stereotypes],
in part because of a
lesser rigidity of defense
and in part because their
political beliefs are often
at
variance with underlying feelings
concerning Jewishness [the
human universalist/Jewish
chauvinist tension].
It is doubtful whether many
individuals, Jewish or Gentile,
can completely
avoid incorporating our society's
stereotype of the Jew. The
point is
that the authoritarian Jew
accepts the stereotype and
recasts it to meet the
circumstance of his Jewishness;
the nonauthoritarian Jew rejects
its validity,
fights its existence within
himself, and is sometimes
ridden by guilt when he
unable to do so completely."
[ADLESON, J., 1960, p. 479]
Zalman
Posner, in championing the
Orthodox Chabad Lubavitcher
religious world view and bemoaning
the fact that there are too
many secular Jews who have
been misguided by concepts
of human universalism, addresses
the religious root in the
conflict between "Christian"
identity and Jewry's traditionally
separatist, and intolerant,
core:
"I
suggest that the American
Jew conceives of religion
and discusses it in
Christian
terms. He grapples with religious
difficulties, because
a
Jew must examine Judaism,
but he does so with Christian
categories. His conflict
is
not necessarily a Jewish one,
but one of reconciling divergent
viewpoints,
the
Jewish and the Christian,
that were never intended to
be reconciled, for
they
represent thoroughly different
values." [POSNER, Z., p. 31]
Stephen
Steinlight, a former American
Jewish Committee official,
observes that
"Jews
regularly identify with 'belief
in social justice' as the
second most important
factor
in their Jewish identity;
it is trumped only by a 'sense
of peoplehood.' It also
explains
the long Jewish involvement
in and flirtation with Marxism.
But it is
fair
to say that Jewish universalistic
tendencies and tribalism have
always existed
in
an uneasy dialectic. We are
at once the most open of peoples
and one second
to
none in intensity of national
feeling. Having made this
important distinction, it
must be admitted that
the essence of the process
of my [Jewish] nationalist
training
was
to inculcate the belief that
the primary division in the
world was between 'us'
and 'them.' Of course
we also saluted the American
and Canadian flags and sang
those
anthems, usually with real
feeling, but it was clear
where our primary loyalty
was meant
to reside." [STEINLIGHT, S.,
OCTOBER 2001]
"The
American Jew,"says Charles
Liebman, "is torn between
two sets of values -- those
of integration and acceptance
into American society and
those of Jewish group survival.
Those values appear to me
to be incompatible." [LIEBMAN,
C., THE AMBIVALENT ..., p.
vii; QUOTED IN O'BRIEN, 2000]
As Paul Cowan once underscored
about his renewed Jewish identity,
and the distinctness
between that and being American:
"Until 1976, when I was thirty-six,
I had always identified as
an American Jew. Now I am
an American and a Jew. I live
at once in the years 1982
and 5743, the Jewish year
in which I am publishing this
book." [COWAN, P., 1982, p.
3]
"Every prayer and
ritual observance in Judaism,”
says Arthur Koestler, "proclaims
membership to an ancient race,
which automatically separates
the Jew from the racial and
historic past of the people
whose midst he lives." [KOESTLER,
p. 287] "Above all," says rabbi Jonathan Sacks,
"the otherness of Jewish law
as something given by God and
interpreted by authoritative
rabbis runs counter to the fundamental
thought of modernity." [SACKS,
J. p. 157] "Traditional views
of the Gentile and the fear
of anti-Semitism persist," wrote
Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen
in 1990, ".... This sense of
estrangement from the non-Jew
and fear of the non-Jew remain
not only for Israelis and not
only for those most deeply committed
to the Jewish tradition." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 40]
Edward
Bernard Glick notes his people's
tradtional identity like this:
"The
Jewish people (as the
American dictionary calls them),
dos yiddische folk
(as
Yiddish speakers refer to themselves),
and am yisrael or ha'am
ha'yehudi
(as
Hebrew speakers refer to the
concept) denote a transnational,
multilingual,
historical,
and religious group which professes
a oneness, a unity, a whole,
a
solidarity,
and a partnership that predates
by millenia the modern Jewish
state.
The
concept applies to all Jews
in the world, whether they realize
it or not,
whether
they want it or not, and whether
they they like it or not. For
Jewish
peoplehood
is Judaism, which is
a religion in the gentile sense.
And the proof
of
this is that no other religious
group in the world so steadily
and so steadfastly
calls
itself a people. Do the multifarous
denominations of American Protestantism,
concerned as they may
be with the fate of foreign
Protestants, call themselves
the Methodist
people, the Baptist people,
the Episcopalian people, or
the Presbyterian
people?
Do American Catholics ... call
themselves the Catholic people,
even though catholic
is a synonym for universal?
Do American Muslims, American
Hindus, and American
Buddhists use the word in reference
to their creeds? No." [GLICK,
E., 1982,
p. 125]
As large numbers
of Jews left the hearts of big
cities over the years, in 1959
Rabbi Albert Gordon's study
called Jews in Suburbia
noted that "Jews seldom come
to know non-Jews any better
in suburbia than they did in
the big city ... To what extent
is this condition the result
of Jewish self-segregation?
Scrutinizing each of the communities
in this study with this question
in mind, I discovered first
of all that ... their closest
friendships are reserved for
other Jews who have the same
community, class, synagogual
and organizational interests.
This primary friendship is natural
-- and characteristic of every
kind of suburb." [GORDON, A.,
p. 170]
Arthur Hertzberg notes
that in post-World War II America,
"even those Jews who affirmed
neither religious nor ethnic
identity admitted that they
were most comfortable with other
Jews. Even the most 'anti-Jewish'
Jews reported that at least
four out of five of their friends
were Jews. This was true even
of people of Jewish origin who
had converted to one of the
branches of Christianity. Jewish
businessmen and professionals
... did business much of the
time with Americans of all origins
and persuasions. They lunched
often with their customers or
clients, but they went home
to have dinner and play cards,
or to play golf on weekends,
or to go to the theater or symphony,
with other Jews." [HERTZBERG,
A., 1989, p. 325]
"In one study," noted
Susan Schneider in the 1980s,
"78% of the Jews (as compared
to 14% of Protestants) say that
they have 'regular interactions'
with at least five households
of [their] relatives. What may
be a uniquely Jewish way of
keeping the kinship ties is
the 'cousins' club,' meeting
regularly to create family networks
that reinforce every member's
sense of belonging, of having
a reference group or 'home room'
even in adulthood." [SCHNEIDER,
p. 265] "Jews appear to be,
by origin and authentic nature,
a tribe," says Jewish author
Eric Kahler, "a primordial social
structure and hence, in spite
of their dispersion the closest
related of historical communities,
closer related among each other
than the locally associated
members of a modern nation."
[KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 10-11]
By scholarly -- or
any other -- accounts, the Jewish
tradition of a clannish collectivism
and communal self-promotive
unity -- religiously or otherwise
-- endures for most Jews today.
"The American Jewish community
is cohesive," wrote Alan Zuckerman
in 1991, "... Because most American
Jews occupy distinctive niches
in the general social, economic,
and political structure of the
United States, each Jew makes
decisions about friends, husband
or wife, neighbors, workmates,
and political associates from
a set of persons, most of whom
are Jews... [ZUCKERMAN, p. 15]
... The ties of residential
concentration and social class
place the American Jewish community
into a distinctive niche in
the general society." [ZUCKERMAN,
p. 22] "The community of class
and status among Jews," says
Calvin Goldscheider, [and] occupational
concentration and educational
achievement at high levels [results]
in [Jewish] social bonds, economic
networks, and common lifestyles
and interests ... [GOLDSCHEIDER,
p. 135].. . The common assumption
that increased levels of education
and occupation would lead to
assimilation of the American
Jewish community [into mainstream
society] ... seems to be unfounded.
An examination of the empirical
evidence has pointed to the
very opposite conclusion. The
uniqueness of the stratification
profile and the distinctive
social mobility patterns of
American Jews mark Jews off
from others and binds Jews to
each other." [GOLDSCHEIDER,
p. 136]
"The commonality of class
and status among Jews," agrees
Esther Wilder, "is distinctive
and results in social bonds,
economic networks, common lifestyles
and interests." [WILDER, 6-96]
"In America as elsewhere,"
noted Benjamin Ginsberg in 1994,
"... Jews are outsiders who
are often more successful than
their hosts ... And, to make
matters worse, Jews often, secretly
or not so secretly, conceive
themselves to be morally and
intellectually superior to their
neighbors." [GINZBURG, p. 8]
"To be a Jew," wrote Eugene
Borowitz in the 1970s," means
to have a bond with every other
Jew -- and somehow know how
to find him." [SILBERMAN, p.
76] "In social intercourse
with other Jews," says Theodore
Reik, "informality and familiarity
form a kind of inner security,
a 'we-feeling.' They know each
other and there are not many
things which need to be explained.
Meeting and speaking with other
Jews is accompanied by the feeling
that they are 'my kind of people.'
It is what [Sigmund] Freud calls
'the clear awareness of an inner
identity, the secret of the
same inner construction.'" [REIK,
T., 1962, p. 228-229]
Early in his acting
career, Marlon Brando recalls
walking with a Jewish friend
in New York City:
"There was a woman
in front of us with blond hair
wearing a mink
coat and we were talking
about her, when Caroline said,
'She's
Jewish.' I asked,
'How do you know?' She answered,
'Well, it's
because ... I don't
know, she's just Jewish.' I
said, 'You mean to
say, just because
she has blond hair and a mink
--" She interrupted,
'Look, I'm a Jew,
and I know what Jews are like
from the front,
back, side or top.'
'Well, how can you tell a Jew
from a non-Jew?'
She replied, 'Well,
you have to be Jewish to know
that.' I was
stunned, and I thought
Caroline had remarkable powers
of
perception." [BRANDO/LINDSEY,
1994, p. 75]
Erich Kahler recalls
and incident involving a fellow
Jew (poet Richard Beer-Hofmann)
in Berlin:
"His face was wrapped
in a woolen scarf [against the
cold] so that
only his eyes could
be seen. An old orthodox Jew
in his caftan came
down the stairs and
stopped him. 'The gentleman
is one of us (Der
Herr ist einer von
uns),' he said to Beer-Hofmann,
'he will tell me
how I can get to the
Nollendorfplatz.' The eyes alone
were enough
to reveal a Jew to
a Jew." [KAHLER, E., 1967, p.
6]
Former
New York Times Executive
Editor Max Frankel notes the
following in his autobiography:
"The best reporters and editors
normally have no race, sex,
or religion. They
may charm or muscle their way
into strange places, but they
try not to THINK
male or female, black or Jewish.
Still, there always comes a
time for exceptions.
I remember reliving the shudders
of refugee life at the sight
of Hungarians trudging across
a frozen frontier swamp. I never
totally banished that twinge
of smug American security
when interviewing high-ranking
Germans. And there's no denying
the conspiratorial
bond that suddenly appeared
when an old man on a park bench
in Kiev whispered,
BIST AH YID? Are you a
Jew? was a question often put
to me, and
with decidedly different inflections.
In Communist countries, it came
from Jews
who meant thereby to ask whether
they could trust me with seditious
conversation.
In Israel, it was asked to discover
whether I would ever put my
feelings for the Jewish state
ahead of my journalistic mission.
Now that I had charge of editorials
at the Times,
the question was usually hurled
with contempt; I was obviously
a Jew, but
in
the eyes of many Jews, an unworthy
one for daring to criticize
the Israeli government.
So whenever I turned to the
subject of Israel, there was
no escaping
my skin." [FRANKEL, M., 1999,
p. 397]
"Jewish civilization
should have vanished a long
time ago," says Henry Feingold,
"that it did not and does not
may also be part of Jewish exceptionalism.
It may well be that Judaism
is governed by different rules
... Jews are a subgroup in this
dynamic society; but they are
also more Jewish, as measured
by the concern for Jewish people
throughout the world." [FEINGOLD,
p. 52] "90% [of American Jews]
claim to feel 'very close' or
'fairly close' to other Jews,"
noted Alan Zuckerman in 1991,
" ... Even when they select
non-Jews [as spouses and friends],
most Jews have strong ties which
pull them back to the Jewish
community." [ZUCKERMAN, p. 27]
"The Jews," noted Jonathan Rieder
in his study of Jews and Italians
in a section of Brooklyn, "had
a pronounced feeling of ethnic
honor, another sign of their
willingness to invest in loyalties
beyond the nuclear family. The
articulateness of Jewish identity,
and the capacity for immersion
in the collective experience
of Jewish suffering, ran contrary
to the muteness of Canarasie
Italians about their ethnicity."
[REIDER, J., 1985, p. 46]
In 1993
Joel Kotkin noted that "an estimated
50 per cent or more of American
Jews send their children to
an ethnic school, and over three-quarters
of young men undergo the traditional
bar mitzvah ceremony. In contrast,
counterpart systems promoting
